16/0 Kovalovsky Rim Control cleanup and exam

[john elder]

This is catch-up day for me on some posts, so thought I would also show the inner workings of a Kovalovsky 16/0 rim control reel that belongs to member Steve Morse. this is a really tough piece of fishing history that still looked great on the outside but had some serious goings-on internally:



The drag was working the spool was turning, but the major problem was that the anti reverse was not working. The reel is set up in "wedding cake" fashion, with the AR dog housed in the outermost layer, next to the handle. The next layer houses the drag, designed in Kovalovsky fashion. the bottom layer houses the planetary gear that runs the spool.

So, I opened up the first layer and it immediately became obvious to the casual observer as to why there was an issue with the anti-reverse:


Not only was everything rusted and gunked up, but a tooth had broken off the AR gear. I assumed that the gear would be a lost cause, but amazingly, I was able to clean it up as well as the single AR dog and spring; since it is simply an anti-reverse, the loss of one tooth is not that big a deal and the other teeth do not appear in danger:



There didn't appear to be any problems with the brake or the planetary gears...just some crud to remove:

brake/drag:
drag band:


drum on which the band acts:

clean:


The planetary gear is set up as shown, married to the brake drum by a gear on opposite face of layer #2. A combination of two gears act to marry the drive to the pinion gear on the spool shaft (would love to have a see-through version of this reel!)



So, after cleaning and lubrications, the faceplate side was good to go.

The other problem I noticed was that the harness lug on the backplate side was distorted. A closer inspection showed that the fight between the aluminum sideplate and the stainless steel harness lug via Galvanic action had done serious damage. Take two such disparate metals and throw in some saltwater and very bad things start happening after a bit. The harness lug had become contorted from the pressure of the moving metals, popping two screws and eroding the side plate:




After cleaning out the degraded material and painting the surface to arrest the process, I filled the divot with JB weld:
I then made new screws for the harness lug and re-installed the now-straighted lug:

[Paul M]

Great post! Thanks, John.

[Brian F.]

Amazing! And the reel is nothing to sneeze at either, lol

[reeltackle]

Thanks for the motivation John! I bought this Kovalovsky 16/0 "Zane Grey" reel 21 years ago and from day one the anti-reverse mechanism never worked. I was always reluctant to open this one up because of the imagined complexity and shear terror of really messing up a otherwise amazing reel.

Thanks to your tutorial I was able to strap on my big boy balls, dive in and fix the mechanism. Seems the spring was on the short side and when the anti-reverse dog was in the groove of the gear the spring would pop out of its notch. The gear would then push the dog up to the top of a gear tooth, but, with the spring now not engaged, the anti-reverse would not work. I tweaked the spring so it would be a bit longer where needed and then readjusted the other end so that it would apply the proper pressure to make the dog go in and out of the gear.





I cleaned up around the inside of the anti-reverse housing and then went in deeper to see what made the drag tick. Art was awful darn good at what he did, the "Zane Grey" is one amazingly precise machine.

Thanks again John for leading the way!

[Tightlines666]

This is great stuff!